The death of the firstborn and the psychiatric hospital: how movie star lions in the apartment became a curse for the Soviet family.

In the fall of 1980, all newspapers wrote about this monstrous emergency, discussed on the radio and in queues. The Disney fairy tale that a lion can become a man's friend, moreover, a pet, almost a cat, ended in the death of a man. Then the question once again arose about whether predators could live among people. There is still no answer to this.

Soviet propaganda encouraged myth-making of the feat: if the first man in space, then ours, if the All-Union Komsomol construction project, then the most grandiose in the world, if the “golden five-year plan” was launched, then we will complete it in three years, therefore, when the Baku newspapers found out that the Berberov family adopted a lion from the zoo and is raising him as a kitten, correspondents immediately went to the address to write a report.

However, the very first conversation with the head of the family, Lev Berberov, shattered the myth about the bright feat of a common man. It turned out that Lev Lvovich had recently been the chief architect of Donbass, had a family and a menagerie - cats, dogs, hedgehogs, which he abandoned after falling in love with his secretary Nina, with whom he fled to Baku. Here the lovers quickly gave birth to two new children. The young family often visited the local zoo, where they noticed a thin baby animal in one of the cages.

“Mom, look at this dog. Let’s take her to us,” asked the Berberovs’ daughter, Eva.

But it turned out that it was not a puppy curled up in an empty cage, but a lion cub. He was born with an infection, fell on his front legs, and his mother lioness refused to feed him. Lev Lvovich was no stranger to the zoo: the Bakgiprogor Institute, where he worked, was designing enclosures for the menagerie. The architect asked the zoo director to give the animal back: “You’ll die here anyway.”

“We named our king of animals, naturally, King (that is, King),” said the owner of the house Nina Berberova. “When the lion cub got a little stronger, grew up and turned into a beautiful lion, we wanted to return him to the zoo. But when they tried to take him there, he caused a real scandal and almost overturned the car. We were told that he would no longer be able to live either in the zoo or in the wild. We had to leave our pet.

The balcony of our apartment overlooked the roof, we put a net on it so that King could not climb out into the street, and we calmly let him walk throughout the living space. Sometimes, when he got bored alone, he would come into my husband’s and my bedroom, climb onto the bed, push me or Leva off it, lie down on his back with his stomach up and fall asleep soundly. In the morning I woke up with everyone else, had breakfast, and played with the children. They dragged him by the mustache, rode him like a horse: you could do anything with him, he didn’t take offense at anything and never snapped.”

It is worth noting that the Berberovs showed maximum care for the new family member: they bottle-fed him, massaged his cramped paws every day, and carried the little one in their arms to the nearest park. In the apartment, Lev was given a mezzanine, to which a ladder was attached, and an old tire was placed in the corridor, on which the lion swung with pleasure.

“King behaved exactly like an ordinary house cat. The only problem: this “cat” tried to lick the guest, and the lion’s tongue was like sandpaper. But if he was really annoying, you could point at him and push him away. The lion resignedly went into a corner or climbed onto the mezzanine, where his rightful place was,” said family friend, photographer Vladimir Alekseev.

Like any domestic cat, King recognized the authority of another family pet, the mongrel Chapa. She taught him good manners - she pushed him under the table when King was naughty, did not allow him to touch food until she had eaten, and taught him to wait for the moment when the owners said it was time to go for a walk. True, King never managed to master the last wisdom with the toilet schedule. The predator peed all over the apartment, despite the fact that he was walked in the park early in the morning. Within a month, the Berberovs’ apartment could easily be found by its foul smell.

“It’s so darn bad that you can hang an ax,” the same Vladimir Alekseev grinned.

Meanwhile, King quickly gained weight at home, grew his hair, and within six months began to eat three kilograms of meat a day.

The first report of a lion sitting on the toilet (staged photo), having breakfast with his family (another staged photo), and covering himself with his favorite blanket on the sofa (quite real) appeared in a Baku newspaper in the spring of 1971 and immediately made King a star. Soon a set of 15 postcards was released in Moscow, which depicted a man-lion family idyll. But this was the glossy side of King's life.

In reality, the Berberovs’ neighbors wrote complaints to the district police officer, to the district committee, that the roar of a predator growing every day was disturbing their sleep at night, wool from the balcony was flying throughout all the apartments. The neighbor is suffocating from allergies.

Most of the complaints came from the Krivenko family, who lived across the wall from the Berberovs. “The lion roared so loudly that the dishes rattled,” said Alexander Krivenko. “Sometimes he would throw himself at the wall with a roar, and our plaster would fall off from these shocks.” But the main thing is the stench and wool. The lion's cage stood one meter from our window. The stench was so bad it made me feel sick all the time. And the wind blew wool into the room.”

But King’s fame had already begun to transform into a cinematic plane, so they gave up on the inconvenience of those around him. Moreover, now every morning a truck with fresh meat came to the lion from the local Central Committee of the Communist Party.  

Photographers and filmmakers paid well for filming the domesticated king of beasts. Realizing that King brought in more income than designing enclosures, Berberov quit and became, as they would now say, a producer of his pet.

In 1975, documentarians made a propaganda film starring King. The lion walked through the forest among the birches, as if not understanding how he ended up here. He tried to find his owners - the children Eva and Roma, who call him with voices from a beautiful distance. He, a kind, majestic cat, explores the world of pristine nature: he meets a squirrel, tries to climb a pine tree, touches the Caspian Sea with his paw. At the end of the film, the children find their beloved King and bring him to the porch of the country house. Connection of nature and man! A Soviet person is capable of more than that. A curtain.

However, not everyone shared this experiment in domesticating a predator. Lion tamer Irina Bugrimova, after watching the documentary, said that the idea was unscientific and could end badly, but she was brushed aside just like her neighbors the Berberovs. Leo has already been overtaken by fame.

By that time, King had been cast in the film “The Girl, the Boy and the Lion,” and then in the film “The Lion Left Home.” When Ryazanov conceived the idea of ​​“The Incredible Adventures of Italians in Russia,” he remembered the famous Baku pet first of all.

After tedious filming in Leningrad, where Berberov constantly demanded new conditions for his pet from the film crew, Lev Lvovich and King were transported to Moscow and settled in a local school at Mosfilm. That's when the tragedy happened. During breaks between filming, King and his assistant Sasha played football in the gym. Berberov left for literally half an hour. At this time, student Markov approached the windows of the hall and began to tease the lion - waving his arms, dancing, making faces.

The lion thought that a cheerful, kind man was calling him to play. He leaned his whole body onto the glass, squeezed it out, then threw the student to the ground and began to chew. The girl waiting for Markov at the fence screamed hysterically: “Help, a lion is tearing a man!”

Police lieutenant Gurov passing by - what a coincidence! - Makarov snatched it and fired. One of the bullets pierced King's heart. To be fair, it should be said that the student was seriously injured and was taken to the hospital with blood loss. His face was torn and his hair was torn out. It was then that the journalists remembered the warning of trainer Bugrimova, who said that without an owner, an animal can behave unpredictably. And so it happened.

King was buried in Moscow, and meanwhile in Baku, friend Chap could not find a place for himself for several days and collected all of King’s things: a blanket, a duckling, his favorite bowl - 10 days later he died at night from a heart attack.

The entire Berberov family fell into black melancholy.

Sergei Obraztsov, Yuri Yakovlev, Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vladi raised money and bought a lion cub at the Kazan Zoo. He was named King II and given to his family.

“To the surprise of many, the Berberovs took a new lion cub into their apartment (now no longer sick, like King was, taken “for nursing”). For what? Is there really a thirst for new articles in newspapers, postcards, TV shows, films, interviews and all other vanity?” — journalist Vasily Peskov wrote in Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Moreover, two months later the designer’s family adopted the puma Lyalya. Both predators were not sick or exhausted, they were completely healthy individuals and, like any dominant animals, they immediately began to show their bestial disposition.

The new King did not recognize any other authority other than Lev Lvovich, whom he chose as the leader of the pack. And the puma Lyalya considered Nina her owner. The predators simply ignored the children and their teams.

King II fully demonstrated his non-cat character on the set of the film “I Have a Lion.” As a reminder of those days, director Konstantin Bromberg was left with a deep scar on his leg from a lion's claw, and the camera assistant lost half a finger when he decided to measure the distance from the camera to the animal's face.

In 1978, Lev Berberov died of a heart attack. Nina Petrovna said that she planned to donate the animals to the Berlin Zoo, but things didn’t go further than conversations; King II and Lyalya continued to feed their family well at the expense of film royalties.

This continued until November 24, 1980.

That day, King II was very nervous - Lyalya was in heat. The lion threw himself onto the balcony railing and roared loudly in the morning. Apparently, the upstairs neighbors were completely tired of this animal roar; they began to set fire to pieces of a plastic comb and throw them at the animal.

“At this time, Roma’s son returned from school, I sat him down to eat,” Nina said. “The lion climbed onto the mezzanine, hung from it, fell off and fell with all his strength on his back, jumped up and rushed at me. He tore my head with his paw and threw me on my back. Roma jumped up and tried to run away, but the Second King caught up with him in one jump and killed him on the spot: he tore off his scalp and broke the cervical vertebrae. I lost consciousness... The doctors saved my life, but after what happened I didn’t want to live at all... I don’t hold a grudge against the Second King, he’s an animal, not a man, and he didn’t understand what he was doing. The only thing I can’t forgive myself is that I didn’t protect my first-born son Roma.”

What about puma Lyalya? She got scared, ran out into the street and immediately received a bullet in the heart from the police, whom the neighbors called after hearing the Berberovs’ screams.

And here’s how family friend Vladimir Alekseev recalled this moment.

“I see: there is a crowd on the street. Immediately my heart skipped a beat. I approach - King is lying dead, and they are dragging in a dead puma... A boy has died, two very expensive animals have died, a woman has suffered a severe mental wound. And all for the sake of vanity.”

Nina Berberova spent six months in a psychiatric clinic, she was treated for depression, she wanted to take her own life. Her surviving daughter, Eva, did not give any further interviews to the press.

Five years later, Nina Berberova married actor Kazim Abdullayev and gave birth to a son, Farhad, and a daughter, Rachel. They still live in Baku - with dogs, cats and a parrot. They don't want to hear about any more predators.

Photo: Legion Media, TASS, stills from the film